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In this week’s Top 5:
- The consequences of speaking out
- The violence of Sean Combs
- Marilyn Munroe vs. Palm Springs, CA
- On caring for a partner with Alzheimer’s
- Why pooping on the moon is crappy
1. Disposable Heroes
Moira Donegan | Bookforum | July 2, 2024 | 4,344 words
In 2022, I published a story about four women who, as teenagers, were groomed and sexually abused by teachers at their acclaimed public high school. I agonized about how the story would affect their lives. So did they. The teachers who hurt them—and other teachers who knew about the hurt—were beloved. How would the women’s peers react to their childhood mentors being exposed as predators? How would the subjects cope with seeing their pain committed to the page? I’m proud of the story and believe it had a positive impact. One of the women got the first letter of the pseudonym I used for her tattooed on her arm as a symbol of empowerment. I heard from dozens of readers who said the story prompted personal reckonings with the wrongdoing that persisted at the school in all but plain sight. An additional survivor of abuse came forward to file a lawsuit. But I also communicated with other victims, and with people aware of other victims, who didn’t want to come forward. I understand that decision, and I thought about it while reading this devastating essay by Moira Donegan. While technically a review of a memoir by Christine Blasey Ford, who testified that Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her during high school, Donegan’s piece is really a much larger project. It’s an indictment of the triumphalist narrative of the #MeToo movement, a reminder that for many survivors, the decision to speak out brought on new forms of pain: bullying, death threats, PTSD. Ford realized that she would forever be narrowly defined in the public eye by her testimony. “You can never be anything else now,” a PR rep told her. Meanwhile, justice has been elusive for many survivors, including Ford. Since his confirmation to the court, Kavanaugh has helped to restrict women’s rights. I fear—as I suspect Donegan does—that other abusers have only gotten savvier about avoiding scrutiny for both past and current wrongs. What, then, was the public spectacle of so much of #MeToo for? “The plundering of public survivors’ psyches…their vulnerability and humiliation, their drained emotions and bank accounts, their curtailed prospects and usurped identities, their rage and grief and degradation,” Donegan writes, “appears, in retrospect, to have been less about our edification than about our entertainment.” —SD
2. I Knew Diddy for Years. What I Now Remember Haunts Me.
Danyel Smith | The New York Times Magazine | July 12, 2024 | 5,724 words
Journalism rule #4080: if you wrote for hip-hop magazines long enough, you ended up with at least one cocktail-party story that involves the specter of violence, veiled or otherwise. (Mine involves Lil Wayne, a tour bus in Florida, and a massive jar full of White Widow.) Most of the time it was a momentary storm cloud, but sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it had more than weed smoke behind it. Sometimes it was physical. Sometimes it was all the above, as it was when Bad Boy Records founder Sean Combs told Vibe editor in chief Danyel Smith he’d see her “dead in the trunk of a car.” That’s the part of the story she’d always remembered; what she’d forgotten, until recently, is the prelude to the death threat. The part where her staff ushered her from office to office, eluding Combs and his security guards until she could escape the building. For Combs, 2024 has been a reckoning of sorts—multiple lawsuits, a federal raid connected with a sex-trafficking investigation, video surfacing of a truly horrific physical assault against R&B singer Cassie—but it’s also the culmination of years of whispers. Whispers that Smith regrets not heeding. Whispers that highlight the bind so many in the music industry, and women especially, found themselves in. “We became used to playing the game; we were conditioned to look the other way or, when looking at something straight ahead, to not see it for what it was,” she writes. As with so much of Smith’s writing, a mournful poetry peeks around every corner in this essay. Journalism is “an art tart with betrayal”; Smith has been “a fly on the wall, and a fly pinned to it”; she “could barely hear music for the tears in [her] ears.” Hers is not a story of journalism’s battle scars. It’s the story of being part of a world that holds you underwater, even as your gifts propel you upward. —PR
3. Huge in Palm Springs
Dan Kois | Slate | June 18, 2024 | 5,103 words
When I was staring at Marilyn Munroe’s uplifted skirt and giant embroidered underpants, I was unaware of the rumbling debate about their existence. It was 2023, I was in Palm Springs for work, and, heading to dinner, I was one of many who stopped to gawk at Seward Johnson’s 26-foot statue Forever Marilyn. It’s hard to miss: slap-bang in the middle of downtown Palm Springs on Museum Way. Marilyn eternally grins into space as she holds down her skirt, immortalizing that 1954 night on Lexington Avenue when a gust from a vent blew it up. (It was a gimmick—the gust came from an industrial fan installed below the sidewalk.) Looking at the five-times-larger-than-life Marilyn felt like an homage to kitsch, a fun embodiment of the heady atmosphere of Palm Springs. Some residents agree. But others think she is an unnecessary roadblock that needs moving, and a few consider her a monstrosity. Hearing about the wealthy Springsians arguing over a “colossal statue of a midcentury sex symbol,” Dan Kois asks: “As much of America is engaged in battles over very different statues that evoke its past, why is this one making so many fancy people so crazy?” Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be complicated. While the basic arguments center around whether or not it was okay to close Museum Way and whether Forever Marilyn is art, the situation has gone on for five years and involved “a litany of committee meetings, architectural designs, legal briefs, environmental reports, and legal demurrers.” I understand if you pause here, doubting your commitment to reading about “a litany of committee meetings,” but rest assured, Kois is well aware of the boredom pitfalls and deftly avoids them. He does not hold back in this highly entertaining piece, gleefully painting characters almost as large as Marilyn and throwing journalistic integrity to the wind to declare how he hates this “huge, tacky statue flashing its knickers at a perfectly nice art museum that doesn’t want it there.” Not just a story about Marilyn but also about Palm Springs, “a make-believe city” in the desert, where maybe, just maybe, she belongs. —CW
4. ‘It Comes for Your Very Soul’: How Alzheimer’s Undid My Dazzling, Creative Wife in Her 40s
Michael Aylwin | The Guardian | July 9, 2024 | 5,937 words
For The Guardian, Michael Aylwin recounts caring for his wife, Vanessa, a marketing professional who died at 53 after battling Alzheimer’s. Vanessa and Michael met by chance on a dance floor in their 30s. At the time she was caring for her mother who already had the disease, and Vanessa was convinced she’d one day have it too. At first Michael brushed off her prediction, but after misplaced keys turned into completely forgotten conversations, he knew she’d been right all along. His first-person account is refreshing and poignant. He cared for Vanessa at home for as long as possible, until she began to show signs of aggression toward their children. Aylwin found it difficult to find professional nursing home care for someone so young. “An angry 50-year-old strutting around the place is a threat they cannot afford to risk,” he says of facilities charged with looking after much older and more vulnerable residents. Aylwin reveals the vast care gaps that exist for people like Vanessa, those too young for traditional nursing homes, yet who require far more care than a loving spouse can provide while trying to raise children and earn a living. The costs of the disease are high and despite the fact it seems more and more prevalent among younger people, there is little public financial support. Aylwin fought for what he did receive, making appeal after appeal. It was hard on him, but he says it was much harder on Vanessa. She knew she had Alzheimer’s; she railed at it in lucid interludes that put the indignity of her decline in stark relief. “’It’s not a life. It’s not a life,’ Vanessa told Michael. ‘I was really vibrant once, going everywhere … ‘ She stopped to sob gently. ‘And now I’m not. I don’t know who I am.’” The Aylwins’ story reminds us that with every day, we must simply make the most of now. —KS
5. Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business
Becky Ferreira | WIRED | June 25, 2024 | 2,276 words
Ever thought about what might happen if you passed a bowel movement in space? (My guess is no.) Here on Earth, gravity pulls your poop down, and flush toilets immediately whisk it away. On the moon, where would it go? Let this squeamish thought sink in, and then buckle up as you read Becky Ferreira’s fun Wired story. “At the dawn of the Space Age,” she writes, “American crews literally just taped a bag on their butts when they had to go, a system that infamously resulted in escaped turds floating through the Apollo 10 command module.” More than 50 years ago, the first astronauts on the moon left nearly 100 “poo bags” across six landing sites—and they’re still sitting there today. I didn’t count how many unexpected phrases and laugh-out-loud lines there are in this piece, but I was thoroughly entertained from Ferreira’s opening paragraph to her last line. Potty humor aside, she provides a fascinating look into this less-appealing aspect of space travel. For NASA and other space agencies to return to the moon, and for companies and billionaires like Richard Branson to launch a new era of tourism, a solid waste management system (pun intended) must be in place. And what about those very old Apollo poo bags left on the lunar surface, teeming with microbiota? What can they tell us about the emergence of life in outer space? “Answers to some of the most profound and ancient questions about our place in the cosmos,” writes Ferreira, “may indeed be waiting in Neil Armstrong’s 55-year-old spent diapers.” A worthy addition to this 💩 reading list. —CLR
Audience Award
This week, our readers ate this piece up:
I Spent Three Years Inhaling Tacos and Corn Dogs in Eating Contests. Here’s Why I Stopped.
Cameron Maynard | Texas Monthly | July 3, 2024 | 1,879 words
Cameron Maynard recounts his time as an amateur competitive eater, an attempt to find the emotional fulfillment he sought by eating in bulk for a cheering crowd. —KS
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